American Collapse

I support Obama's infrastructure initiative wholeheartedly, but with two cautionary notes. First, a general one: Don't shortchange long-range planning and restructuring in the short-term interest of creating jobs by giving top priority to projects that are "shovel-ready." American leaders recognize the need to alter how this country uses energy; they may be less clear that this need should inspire them to fundamentally rethink American land use patterns and reconsider which patterns the government should discourage and which it should support. (To give one obvious example, higher density settlements reduce the need for frequent long-distance travel and thereby facilitate more efficient mass transit.) Second, a specific one with far-reaching ramifications: Don't ignore the gross inefficiency of the American construction industry on which many of these infrastructural initiatives will depend. (Studies estimate that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the total time spent on the average American construction site is wasted.) Use our New New Deal to push that problem-rife industry toward long-overdue restructuring, which should be no less dramatic--and enormously more economically significant--than the one that everyone recognizes the comparatively small and comparatively efficient auto industry needs. For a devastating diagnosis, Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is a good place to start, and it must be a start, as this critical problem plaguing such a large percentage of our economy is not even on the public's or policymakers' radar screens.

American Collapse